Proving a negative
I keep hearing people harping about how since you can’t prove a negative one is always left with the position of not knowing whether or not God exists. Though the first part of this statement is indeed true, the second is not.
You see, quite simply people keep looking at this ass-backward. It isn’t that the onus is on the atheist to prove the non-existence of God for that is simply impossible, but instead the onus is on the theist to prove that God exists. To date no credible evidence has come up to prove that he does. Sure, people like to use everything in the world as some sort of proof, but at the end of the day it isn’t anything that can more simply be demonstrated as a natural phenomenon. Unless they’re taking a definitional approach and thus assuming that words such as “perfect” have some magical power in them that forces them to point to existent entities…like unicorns and perpetual motion machines. Of course my favorite argument is that the Universe couldn’t have created itself and can’t have been around forever so it must have been created by something…which they claim either created itself or has been around forever.
All said I grow tired of people harping on the whole negative proof thing because it is simply disingenuous. Atheists aren’t proving a negative…they’re simply asking for a solid piece of evidence. Just one will do. And no, the book doesn’t work since no theist believes that all of the books just like the bible, Koran, or whatnot are true…just one. And of course it is the one that their parents believed or is most prevalent in their culture, though some switch to another just to be rebellious.
Until that evidence is shown God belongs with alien visitation and bigfoot: nice stories that yet so far have no proof, and thus are not to be believed.